For over ten years, Vincent Meessen has been incisively exploring the multiple and contested faces of Western modernity. Embracing media that range from the moving image and its display structures to typographic interventions, Meessen revisits forgotten or overlooked episodes of what is largely perceived to be a Eurocentric history, often found in the dark pages of our colonial past.
Sire, je suis de l’ôtre pays builds on the filmic installation One.Two.Three, shot entirely in the famous club "One Two Three" of OK Jazz in Kinshasa. Africalia supported the work of young female musicians of Kinshasa who took part in the production of this artwork, created for the Belgian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennal.
Starting from an insurrectionary song written in May ‘68 this work reveals a unknown connection between the Situationist International and the Congo. One.Two.Three questions the historiography of modernity’s last international avant-garde, which upset so radically the prevailing view of the relationship between art, politics and everyday life. Through collaboration with young female musicians from Kinshasa, the rumba as a transcultural form serves as a vehicle for a meditation on emancipation, an undertaking that is fundamentally unresolved and condemned to repetition.
Exhibition dates : 19 February – 24 April 2016
Vernissage : 18 February 2016 at 19:00 PM. A concert by COLOR RUMBA will take place at 21:00 PM
Address : Avenue Van Volxem 354 Van Volxemlaan, 1190 Brussels
More info : http://www.wiels.org
